If ID Theorists Are Right, How Should We Study Nature?

One can at least point a direction by now. I began this series by asking, what has materialism (naturalism) done for science? It made a virtue of preferring theory to evidence, if the theory supports naturalism and the evidence doesn't. Well-supported evidence that undermines naturalism (the Big Bang and fine tuning of the universe, for example) attracted increasingly speculative attempts at disconfirmation. Discouraging results from the search for life on Mars cause us to put our faith in life on exoplanets -- lest Earth be seen as unusual (the Copernican Principle).

All this might be just the beginning of a great adventure. World-changing discoveries, after all, have originated in the oddest circumstances. Who would have expected the Americas to be discovered by people who mainly wanted peppercorns, cinnamon, sugar, and such? But disturbingly, unlike the early modern adventurers who encountered advanced civilizations, we merely imaginethem. We tell ourselves they must exist; in the absence of evidence, we make faith in them a virtue. So while Bigfoot was never science, the space alien must always be so, even if he is forever a discipline without a subject.

But now, what if the ID theorists are right, that information rather than matter is the basic stuff of the universe? It is then reasonable to think that meaning underlies the universe. Meaning cannot then be explained away. It is the irreducible core. That is why reductive efforts to explain away evidence that supports meaning (Big Bang, fine-tuning, physical laws) have led to contradictory, unresearchable, and unintelligible outcomes.

The irreducible core of meaning is controversial principally because it provides support for theism. But the alternative has provided support for unintelligibility. Finally, one must choose. If we choose what intelligent design theorist Bill Dembski calls "information realism," the way we think about cosmology changes.

First, we live with what the evidence suggests. Not simply because it suits our beliefs but because research in a meaningful universe should gradually reveal a comprehensible reality, as scientists have traditionally assumed. If information, not matter, is the substrate of the universe, key stumbling blocks of current materialist science such as origin of life, of human beings, and of human consciousness can be approached in a different way. An information approach does not attempt to reduce these phenomena to a level of complexity below which they don't actually exist.

Materialist origin of life research, for example, has been an unmitigated failure principally because it seeks a high and replicable level of order that just somehow randomly happened at one point. The search for the origin of the human race has been similarly vitiated by the search for a not-quite-human subject, the small, shuffling fellow behind the man carrying the spear. In this case, it would have been well if researchers had simply never found their subject. Unfortunately, they have attempted at times to cast various human groups in the shuffler's role. Then gotten mired in controversy, and largely got the story wrong and missed its point.

One would have thought that materialists would know better than to even try addressing human consciousness. But materialism is a totalistic creed or else it is nothing. Current theories range from physicist Max Tegmark's claim that human consciousness is a material substance through to philosopher Daniel Dennett's notion that it is best treated somewhat like "figments of imagination" (don't ask whose) through philosopher Alex Rosenberg's idea that consciousness is a problem that will have to be dissolved by neuroscience. All these theories share two characteristics: They reduce consciousness to something that it isn't. And they get nowhere with understanding what it is. The only achievement that materialist thought can claim in the area of consciousness studies is to make them sound as fundamentally unserious as many current cosmologies. And that is no mean feat.

Suppose we look at the origin of life from an information perspective. Life forms show a much higher level of information, however that state of affairs came about, than non-living matter does. From our perspective, we break no rule if we assume, for the sake of investigation, that the reason we cannot find evidence for an accidental origin of life is that life did not originate in that way. For us, nothing depends one way or the other on demonstrating that life was an accident. We do not earn the right to study life's origin by declaring that "science" means assuming that such a proposition is true and proceeding from there irrespective of consequences. So, with this in mind, what are we to make of the current state of origin-of-life research?

Editor's note: Here is the "Science Fictions" series to date at your fingertips.

Intelligent design is not creationism, nor is it a religious position. It is the application of design theory to the natural and living world. Intelligent design theorists point to the existence of precise physical laws and the fine tuning of universal constants, the staggering complexity and nanotechnology of the living cell, and the digitally-coded information content of DNA as evidence for a designing intelligence. The latter is particularly persuasive as all our experience indicates that information of the quality in DNA only arises from prior intelligence.

Problems Materialism / Naturalism has caused in the name of Science

1. EUGENICS

Eugenic racism in 1925 was consensus science in the field of human evolution. By 1928 there were 376 university-level courses on eugenics, and there was widespread support from scientists and other academics at leading universities -- Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins, to name a few -- as well as enthusiastic support from media and government. Eugenic science was funded lavishly by the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Harriman Railroad foundation, and the wealthy businessman J.H. Kellogg. Many national and international conferences on eugenics and human evolution were hosted at leading research institutions, including the American Museum of Natural History, and eugenic science gained the imprimatur of leading scientific organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. Wealthy donors created the Eugenic Records Office on Long Island, later to become the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. By the 1930s, thirty-one states in the U.S. would pass compulsory sterilization laws based on mainstream eugenic science and human evolution, and eugenics would receive the explicit endorsement of the Supreme Court in 1926. By the end of the first half of the 20th century, sixty thousand Americans had been sterilized involuntarily on the basis of consensus eugenic science.

Racism and eugenics were the hallmarks of the theory of human evolution in the early 20th century, representing a clear consensus of evolutionary biologists as well as other scientists and leaders in higher education and government. There were a few dissenters, but such skeptics were disdained in mainstream scientific circles. - Michael Egnor

Improvement of Man. - If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of future generations of men and women on the earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection.

Eugenics. - When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, that dread white plague which is still responsible for almost one seventh of all deaths, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science is of being well born is called eugenics.

Parasitism and its Cost to Society. - Hundreds of families such as those described above exist to-day, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.

The Remedy. - If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country. - Hunters Civic Biology (the textbook at the centre of the Scopes Trial)

The Nazis practiced eugenics as championed by the leading Darwinist in Germany, Ernst Haeckel. Even today we have not rid society of eugenics as we see in; high rates of abortion among the poor, the killing of female infants in China and India, and the selection of desired traits from sperm banks and frozen eggs.

In the Darwin view of humans as animals, what would cause us to stop practicing animal husbandry within our own species? Reduce the meaning of "human" to "just another animal", and eugenics is fair game. Scientific data is well supported in animal husbandry. Eugenics is only abhorrent to those who recognize that there is something transcendently special about humans.

2. VESTIGIAL ORGANS

Excerpt: The appendix, like the once vestigial tonsils and adenoids, is a lymphoid organ (part of the bodys immune system) which makes antibodies against infections in the digestive system. Believing it to be a useless evolutionary left over, many surgeons once removed even the healthy appendix whenever they were in the abdominal cavity. Today, removal of a healthy appendix under most circumstances would be considered medical malpractice (David Menton, Ph.D., The Human Tail, and Other Tales of Evolution, St. Louis MetroVoice , January 1994, Vol. 4, No. 1).

Doctors once thought tonsils were simply useless evolutionary leftovers and took them out thinking that it could do no harm. Today there is considerable evidence that there are more troubles in the upper respiratory tract after tonsil removal than before, and doctors generally agree that simple enlargement of tonsils is hardly an indication for surgery (J.D. Ratcliff, Your Body and How it Works, 1975, p. 137).

The tailbone, properly known as the coccyx, is another supposed example of a vestigial structure that has been found to have a valuable functionespecially regarding the ability to sit comfortably. Many people who have had this bone removed have great difficulty sitting.

3. JUNK DNA DISEASES

Uncounted millions of people died miserable deaths while scientists were looking for the gene causing their illnesses  and were not even supposed to look anywhere but under the lamp illuminating only 1.3% of the genome (the genes).

Excerpt: By 2005 fundamental problems with underlying axioms of genomics became too obvious. Meanwhile, millions, if not hundreds of millions were dying of junk DNA diseases while 98.7% of the human DNA was officially still considered untouchable. - International HoloGenomics Society  Junk DNA Diseases

Discouraging results from the search for life on Mars cause us to put our faith in life on exoplanets -- lest Earth be seen as unusual (the Copernican Principle).

Generally good article. But this part doesn't make much sense.

I don't know anyone who expected to find evidence of life on Mars and has therefore been forced to drop back to expecting life to be present on exoplanets.

It's been pretty thoroughly known for upwards of 50 years that we are unlikely to find evidence of life in this solar system away from Earth.

Recent evidence is that planets and solar systems are common if not ubiquitous. It is likely that the basic conditions for life are also fairly common, which of course does not necessarily mean that life itself is.

"It is likely that the basic conditions for life are also fairly common,"

This is not necessarily true. There have been physicists who claiml they have been able to identify at least 25 finely tuned variables (ie, temperature, gravitational force, radiation level, etc. etc.) which must all be present for life as we know it to exist. The probabiliity against all or even half of these finely tuned variables to be present on any given planet is off the charts. Something like 10 to the negative 250th power or, in other words, impossible.

ID as a guiding principle for research is a double edged proposition. Unlike the mechanistic approach, ID assumes some form of “master plan” or “central organizing principle” that defines life. It becomes not unlike a Philosopher’s Stone and runs the risk of being every bit as quixotic, or it may help. That would be “help” in the sense of being better able to control, understand and predict Nature’s way.

Alternatively, ID can cause intellectual laziness. Frustrated, a researcher throws his hands up and decides God won’t give up that secret.

Now, for the disturbing part. ID does not preclude Darwinism. How we think about the relationships between randomness and order in Nature is really piss poor superficial. Reverse thermodynamics there is a little dabbling, Chaos Theory, maybe a little better, but there is no developed system of thought on the subject. Unless someone else knows about something...

ID as a guiding principle for research is a double edged proposition. Unlike the mechanistic approach, ID assumes some form of “master plan” or “central organizing principle” that defines life. It becomes not unlike a Philosopher’s Stone and runs the risk of being every bit as quixotic, or it may help. That would be “help” in the sense of being better able to control, understand and predict Nature’s way.

Alternatively, ID can cause intellectual laziness. Frustrated, a researcher throws his hands up and decides God won’t give up that secret.

Now, for the disturbing part. ID does not preclude Darwinism. How we think about the relationships between randomness and order in Nature is really piss poor superficial. Reverse thermodynamics there is a little dabbling, Chaos Theory, maybe a little better, but there is no developed system of thought on the subject. Unless someone else knows about something...

Granted, but most of the attributes of our Sun are destructive of life rather than conductive to it. For example, unless the heat of the sun is within a very narrow temperature range life cannot exist. Same with radiation and gamma rays and other emissions. The studies I mentioned are discussed extensively in Norman Geisler's book, "I don't have enough Faith to be an Atheist".

Advancing naturalism (the belief that nature is all there is) produces both expected and unexpected effects. The Harris poll found that belief in Darwins theory of evolution increased to 47 percent, up from 42 percent in 2005

As a result, some will crow that Science is winning over superstition! But it isnt. Between 2005 and 2013, belief increased in

 ghosts from 41% to 42%

 UFOs from 35% to 36%

 astrology stayed the same at 29%

 witches decreased significantly from 31% to 26%

 reincarnation increased from 21% to 24%

While the noted increases are small, we should expect declines nearly across the board instead, if the science wins thesis were correct. (The one exception is UFOs; as a sciencey belief, they correlate with naturalism despite lack of evidence.) Further, we would expect young people (1836) to reject ghosts and reincarnation more strongly than older people (68+) do.

And they don’t. On the contrary, younger folk believe in ghosts at 44% to seniors 24%. In UFOs at 36% to 30%. In astrology at 33% to 23%. In witches at 27% to 18%. And in reincarnation at 27% to 13%.

In short, naturalism offers liberation, not from the bonds of superstition but from the burden of rationality. And we must address the fact that increasing numbers of young people are embracing that liberation. More.

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